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The Green Bag

be a painter, nor one stone-deaf from birth a musician, nor, in short, anybody a successful workman in work he is morally or mentally or physically unfit to do. Moreover, one of the great majority of men, in America as else where, must look to his hands or his head to fill his mouth and other mouths, big and little, which will crave fining around his fireside; and, whatever the dignity or interest of any form of work, unless it make the pot boil it can be but a luxury in this work-a-day world. But given that, so far as he can tell in advance of experience, he could do the work of the law no worse and not much better than the work of any one of sev eral other callings, and given further that he thinks he could make a living either as a lawyer or otherwise, whether our supposed young man will do well if he become a lawyer will depend, in last resort, on what, beside a lawyer, he expects and wishes and hopes the prac tice of the law to make of him. He may look to it to make him a rich man, as men are nowadays counted rich in America: to some, per haps to many Americans of today wealth, of itself and in the main for itself, is, or at least seems to be, the end of life, the summum bonum of an earthly existence. In saying this, it is needless to add that I do not mean by "wealth" a reasonable, even an abun dant, provision for old age or mis fortune; nor yet the wherewithal of com fort, or even of rational luxury, for him self and his family; that he should seek for these things shows merely that he has common sense and the common wants and wishes of mankind. The frame of mind which makes riches the goal of human effort is illustrated by a remark said to have been made many years ago by a well-known old gentle man of my native city. Speaking with

great contempt of one among his neigh bors, he exclaimed: "Oh, he is a miser able creature! He hasn't ten thousand dollars in the world!" The sentiment inspiring this remark was not common in Baltimore then, and in truth is not common there now, but there is a larger and more prosperous city to the north of Baltimore where, in certain circles and with some expansion in figures, it is sufficiently familiar. If a man have a million, he is entitled to treatment as a human being; if he have ten, he is named with reverence; if a hundred, he is approached with nine prostrations. It may well be, nay it is certain, that some young Americans look forward to the last mentioned happy estate as the dies idealis of their earthly days; and it may be also that among them some may think of the law as a portal to the sublunar paradise. But if any would-be "captains of industry" or "Napoleons of finance" or others longing to be multi millionaires among my hearers propose to study and practise law as a means of becoming what they thus would be, I give them the advice of Punch to those minded to get married: "Don't." The methods whereby our phenomenally rich men and our huge corporations and clusters of corporations have grown to be so rich and so huge are well illus trated in the record of a suit which I recently heard decided by the Supreme Court of the United States. A certain great combination, almost incredibly prosperous, had some 6,600 gallons of coal-oil in a large receptacle at Guthrie, Oklahoma. By the laws of Oklahoma, then a territory, when oils could not stand certain tests in flashing and specific gravity they were required to be sold in special packages marked so as to show their dangerous character. By some mistake, 300 gallons of gasolene were run into the tank at Guthrie, and